10/5/13

Game(Engine) Jam, Day 1 Recap

I spent the first hour or two today working on trying to implement my game idea into my partially-completed engine(The AMAZE one). That pretty much failed. The engine isn't ready for a game jam, and it definitely shows. I briefly considered just tossing something together from the ground up, as usual, but then I stopped myself. Wasn't the entire point of this engine avoiding just that??? So, here we are. I'm going to scrap that game idea, and switch focus for this jam. Instead of a game jam, I'm going to make this a game engine jam.

While working on AMAZE, I've had an ever-growing list of things to add to my engine that I've either deemed low priority, or have just been slacking off on. I've decided to see how many features and fixes I can give this engine in the span of ten days. If I'm lucky, it'll end up in a state where I can just about finish AMAZE with it and move on.
Now that I've explained that, here's what I got done today:
-I started off nice and easy. I'd been meaning to make my asset packager use tsx(tiled tileset files) to get tileset information, like tile size. That works now, and I even took a while to make the tileset packaging code more readable. If I ever need to go back to it later, it should be easier to work with.
-Later, I decided to fix a really annoying bug. If you read this post, you probably noticed the vertical lines in the tiles. I said they were nothing, but on closer inspection they actually were the result of a bug. Staring at those lines was making my eyes hurt, so I found the issue and fixed it. Turns out, when I was loading the color data I was skipping the first two bytes. This also explains why the color order seemed to be jumbled. Tomorrow, I want to finish collision detection(finally), and possibly work on view scrolling. Here's a screenshot showing the correctly working tiles:

Remember that most of this is just placeholder art

While I'm at it, here's something that I never got to post about: The player can no longer walk through walls. I got that working a while ago, but the retrospective(and the jam) got in the way of part 10.